The problem addressed by the invention is initially illustrated on the basis of two concrete examples.
In a first example, a car manufacturer sells a car having a mobile terminal enabling backseat passengers in particular to watch videos, and the manufacturer takes charge of the subscription to the mobile account associated with the mobile terminal. The data exchanged by means of this mobile account may comprise “infotainment” and possibly also telemetry data (e.g. from sensors sensing the operation of parts of the car, or sensors sensing the behavior of the driver in order to give the driver periodic advice about the way he or she is driving). The sale price of the car then includes the mobile subscription for a certain duration. The mobile account is in the name of the manufacturer, and all network consumption by the mobile terminal is billed to the manufacturer.
In order to avoid the cost price of the car being evaluated on the basis of an erroneous estimate of this network consumption, the car manufacturer would like to pay for telemetry data only, with the consumption of infotainment being billed directly to the user by the car manufacturer (which ends up being billed for all of these uses by the telecommunications operator providing the mobile subscription).
A drawback of such a solution is that it obliges the user to subscribe to a mobile subscription with said telecommunications operator which might, a priori, be an operator other than the operator with which the user is already a subscriber for the user's personal or business mobile terminal. In addition, a priori, the user would not have access to personal services to which the user has subscribed in the context of the personal or business mobile account, e.g. secure access to the business, access to a premium service including specific audiovisual services, real time consultation of consumption, etc.
In a second example, a camera manufacturer might desire to fit all cameras with a SIM card enabling clients to send the photos they have taken anywhere in the world directly to their personal cloud storage space so as to make them accessible to their families or friends. In the prior art, in order to do this, the user of such a camera would need to subscribe to an additional network subscription, and the camera would not enable that user to verify network consumption in real time.